Prof John McDowell: "Can cognitive science determine epistemology?"

[@CPLains]

This is more or less a direct reply to Tyler Burge. Check out Burge's "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology" and McDowell's reply "Tyler Burge on Disjunctivism" as well as Burge's reply to that article in his "Disjunctivism Again."

[@betoperdido]

thanks for the tip bro

[@edmundhusserljr.7574]

1. If you are genuinely and deeply concerned about the questions that concern philosophy, and the answers that philosophy seeks: (1). Listen through the messenger to the message (2). Comprehend the meaning and it logic, not the rhetoric and the style (or the 'sniffing' - for goodness' sake!) Sometimes that requires some concentration and effort. But if you genuinely care about the fundamental topic that is being debated, and the meanings and arguments that are being offered, then that is precisely what you'll be listening to; that is precisely what you'll be thinking about. If that's not what you want, go watch your local prime time commercial TV entertainment, where the style, rhetoric, and messenger are all that there is, and the message, meaning, and logic are totally irrelevant, if they even exist. Despite its guardedness and repetitiveness (understandable, if you're at all familiar with the "minefield of epistemology" to which McDowell refers in this lecture - if you're trying to tiptoe through a minefield, you would definitely take considerable care about every single little step), McDowell's argumentation is in fact quite clear, and quite compelling. It definitely deserves very serious philosophical consideration and discussion. (Wouldn't it be nice if there were serious and intelligent philosophical discussion about the philosophical content of such videos appended to them... Clearly, one has to look for that elsewhere.) Anyway. McDowell is expressing a very important philosophical idea, here; one that matters very much to the contemporary situation of epistemology and metaphysics, and the philosophy of cognitive science (and of natural science more generally). What he actually says is far more important, and makes a lot more sense, than any of the inane comments that have been made, below, to this lecture. In my considered judgment, I think the conclusions for which he argues here are - in their essential content - correct. But I think the argumentation can be made more cogent and more accessible by means of, and from the perspective of, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. In any case, I'm a seriously interested follower of what McDowell actually SAYS, as distinct from the way he says it, or what his body happens to do while he's in the process of saying it. Incidentally, this reminds me of a story in Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of the Philosophers, about Plato in the agora, being commented upon by Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes says, "I can see the cup, but I can't see this alleged 'cupness'." And Plato says, "That's because you don't have the nous to see it."

[@DanLackey]

+Edmund Husserl Jr. Style is substance. Oscar Wilde, Jr.

[@joo_joo_eyeball]

I would not be surprised if the whole content of this presentation can be stated more clearly in a page at the very most. Take this snippet: “If someone sees that there is a sloping surface in-front of her, her experience itself makes visually present to her some environmental reality who’s being a reality entails that there is a sloping flat surface in-front of her. So her position in having the experience she has leaves open no possibility that there isn’t a sloping flat surface in front of her”. That's just "Seeing P entails P" which is hardly controversial.

[@ianhruday9584]

I can see his point about why neuroscience doesn't rule out his project, but I'm not sure I totally buy the argument given at the beginning of the lecture for why "seeings" have a different status than "seeming seeings." For one thing, it is seeming seeings which are accessible to self-conscious reflection. I'm not sure I know that it means to "seem to have a reason," in this context. Moreover, surly there are cases where we want to acknowledge the possibility of perceptual error without dismissing the "seeming seeing" as an instance of illusion or taking it for granted. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like he relies on the constraint that in order to have knowledge we be totally warranted in ruling out all possibility of error. In order to do this he externalizes the ideas of "warrant" and "reasons," thereby leaving self-conscious reflectors with "seeming warrant" and "seeming reasons" as resources to reflect with. I can't say that he's wrong exactly, but I can say that this is a strange use of the words "warrant" and an even stranger use of the word "reasons." Or have I totally missed the boat on this?

[@fr.hughmackenzie5900]

I think it's more that we cannot have any meaning if it's not based upon some successful use of our perceptual faculty. This means it's normal and natural to have certainty about the object which therefore, in a good and successful use of the faculty, warrants the certainty. Faculty misuse removes such warrant but that must be an exception given the very dynamics of meaning.

[@tfelder]

There is nothing to say that future neuroscience won't be able to recognise a seeming-seeing for what it is (experientially); while scientific method would simultaneously tell us that it is so -- has only experiential truth value -- but that it is in fact an optical illusion, or whatever... we're no less stuck with the question: 'how do we treat the 'scientific' evidence that tells us the other scientific evidence is false'? In that sense we never get 'beyond' epistemology, no matter how much neuroscience we throw at it.

[@fr.hughmackenzie5900]

But I thought McDowell showed that the very methodology of neuroscience etc. rules out taking account of the foundational place of seeing over seeming seeing.

[@PseudoPseudoDionysius]

Am I the only one who wets themselves with laughter every time he brings up the flat sloping surface?

[@christopherhamilton3621]

What gets me is the genus/species of ‘seeming seeing’s’. Jesus; no wonder the public has a problem with academia!

[@modvs1]

It seems to be steaming; it’s a steaming seeing; an epic-steamy-bogical seeing,…

[@tehninjadude]

when the sloping flat surface bottom text

[@modvs1]

You can really appreciate the dire philosophical implications of leaving the notion of ‘action’ out of the perceptual picture. Alva Noe would be pulling his hair out over this if he had any, or maybe that’s why he doesn’t (?),…

[@fr.hughmackenzie5900]

Philosophy of action is next but it needs the fundamental affirmation of the intrinsic complementarity of knowing subject and distinct object McDowell provides.

[@kvaka009]

​@fr.hughmackenzie5900 why? I don't see how the very distinction between subject and object can be maintained without actions on the part of the sinker that are about the object.

[@dubbelkastrull]

51:05 bookmark

[@JCResDoc94]

If a philosopher's presentation on seeming seeing involves a lot of seeming sniffing; is it epistemically valid, from a cognitive science perspective, to sell pseudoephedrine over the counter, given a seeming sloping surface may well be a running nose and does this entail a necessary ontological difference regarding the subjective epistemic gain of a nonlocal seeming seer? I say yes.

[@omnipop4936]

Seems right.

[@christopherhamilton3621]

Pills are dispensed on a sloping flat surface and scraped into a gutter that feeds the vial. The surface, gutter and vial are a warranted metaphor for an education system gone awry.

[@modvs1]

I've tried so many time to sit through this and I just can't do it. Can anyone provide a precis?

[@benaberry578]

modvs1 was it the sniffing?

[@galek75]

Haha but way more listenable than Brandom.

[@SellarsJones]

@@galek75definitely not.

[@MyMPPM]

"... is more or less a direct ..." spoken like a true student of philosophy Thanks for the homework, I will indeed check them out, perhaps it will inspire me to finish the other 90% of this vid. Thanks again

[@nelsonespinoza698]

buen hombre

[@sparkyy0007]

Using a monotone generic computer voice would have gone a long way to make the lecture more interesting.

[@MarkCarbajal]

This is why the nimbus in philosophy is lost.....

[@modvs1]

This is like a spoken word version of an Ad Reinhardt painting- listening to paint dry!

[@MyMPPM]

I'm sorry, I stopped at 5:17 because this lecture but does not translate well from the written text. I've seen many epistemology vids, because I have a great interest in the subject, so I am more likely to put up with things that many others won't. I invite you to view them to get a idea of how to better deliver your message.

[@modvs1]

So an hour of impenetrable waft just to adumbrate that perception might not be representational; and we don’t even get to find out why, because they guy who recorded the first lecture fell into a deep coma and couldn’t record the second.

[@christopherhamilton3621]

The scientist putting the qualifier ‘apparent’ into a sentence ahead of the subject obviates this entire philosophical rabbit hole, IMHO.

[@modvs1]

Grounded and 4E theories of cognition stop all over this verbiage. The biggest mistake of the analytic and formalist traditions was to leave out (embodied!) action. Not even a mention of James Gibson. This seems a load of ‘steaming’ Intellectualist codswallop- par excellence. Seeing the slope and judging it to be so is of no consequence if you don’t plan on negotiating its ‘affordances’; and where exactly is there an office I can get one of these ‘warrants’ from? Can I get one online? Cue Dan Hutto!

[@modvs1]

"stomp"

[@gerhitchman]

Yawn

[@MarkCarbajal]

The entire lecture amounts to two words: legitimized babble.....

[@nimrod4996]

Sceince is good. Nevertheless, it holds no bearing over the the realm of the normative, that is, linguistic-cultural realm of human existence. There is nothing one language-game (Scientific, representational) can say about another. Philosophy can not take one form of understanding to have special excess to reality. It can, and must, make explict the general nature of all forms of understanding: rational, linguistic, normative and social. Nature is a concept that derives from language. There is no empirical data which is not based on conceptual content (myth of the given), that is, normative-cultural content. Natural explanations hold no bearing over the cultural/humanistic ones. In fact, the cultural precedes and completely grounds the natural, for Philosophy and science alike.